CS @ HBS

3. Discuss a defining experience in your leadership development. How did this experience highlight your strengths and weaknesses as a leader? (400-word limit)

Everybody knows that HBS is just crazy about leadership. <Irony> You don’t stand a chance if you didn’t start your own company, managed at least 50 subordinates or at least led a fund-raising of a sum greater than 500,000 Italian Lira. </Irony>

Well, similar to my analysis of Essay 2, also here I can at least use my example: I was a team leader of 5 people, and also managed a couple of global ad-hoc projects, the largest of which included ~10 people.

You see the numbers aren’t huge. However, throughout my entire life I believe I showed a lot of initiative, creativity and ability to come up with new ideas and follow them through to successful implementation. I was also a trainer and speaker and had opportunities to lecture and talk in front of large, senior audiences. All of this, in my opinion, is also part of leadership. In fact, I believe leadership consists of many implicit things: the ability to convince people in your ideas – your supervisors, your team members and your subordinates, the ability to make people follow you, to inspire your team members, to successfully delegate, to develop your people and keep them happy and motivated, and many other things that together constitute ‘good leadership’ and ‘good management’.

I’m sure you can come up with great examples demonstrating you abilities in these areas, even if you were not a team leader or in another explicit leadership position.

A few technical comments:

• This essay naturally calls for one good story that you’ll develop, with a few representative anecdotes. Don’t include more than one story, as the question specifically asks for one example, and there’s not much space anyway.
• Don’t forget the “strengths and weaknesses” part, and supply short – but descriptive – anecdotes for each one, or at least for the strengths. Don’t just write “I successfully delegated tasks” but give a concise example.
• You’d want to write twice as much about the strengths, of course. However, don’t write about ‘pseudo-weaknesses’ or weaknesses that are really strengths-in-disguise. For example, in my first draft of this essay I wrote that the project I was leading put me in a lot of stress and made me drink too much coffee and dream about it at night. Well, nice, but it’s not that much of a weakness… After getting feedback along these lines I added a more ‘real’ weakness – the stress caused me to demand too much of my people, including asking them to stay too long at the office and overreact in general.

Summary

Another place to impress – but this time about leadership. Remember that leadership isn’t always the obvious ‘I managed 75 people’ (although if you did that, great, and definitely talk about it as this is an uncommon leadership achievement) – in fact, it might be even more unique and conspicuous to discuss leadership from a different angle.

Make sure this essay doesn’t unintentionally overlap with the accomplishments essay – no need to waste ‘airtime’ repeating things that have already been said; best to highlight additional points.